Having attended Dreamforce 2017 earlier this month in San Francisco, I decided to revisit the slideshow I created three years ago coming out of Salesforce's 2014 event. The Dreamforce 2014 slideshow highlighted contact center vendors that exhibited at the show, as does this one.

As I compare the two events from a contact center perspective, several changes are worth noting:

Of repeat vendors, some have the same branding while others have a modified version as a result of consolidation. Avaya, Five9, and NewVoiceMedia fall in the first category, while NICE inContact is in the second, for example.

Several vendors that attended in 2014 chose not to participate in 2017: 8x8, Genesys, Serenova (then LiveOps), and Vocalcom. Cost may have been an issue for some (as I discuss elsewhere in this slideshow, Dreamforce is not for the faint of wallet). For others the decision may have been strategic.

There were new contact center faces, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), RingCentral, and Talkdesk.

Finally, another difference from three years ago is the relevance of Salesforce itself in the contact center space. Although important in 2014, Service Cloud now has omni-channel, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) components that make it a clear rival of pure-play contact center companies.

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